Organic Traffic Drop by 75%

Nothing in the latest release would have caused any issues in the GSC. Even if it did, changes in the sitemap section wouldn’t negatively affect your site’s traffic.

Lately GSC has been experiencing issues, and this is likely one of them.

Try removing your sitemap from GSC. Then clear any caching you have. Then re-add your sitemap.xml.

Thanks Michael.

I’ve just did what you’ve suggested but I see the same results.

In GSC > URL Inspection, Coverage: Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
Sitemaps N/A

I wonder if this is the reason.

By the way according to Google Search Console account there are not:

-Manual Actions
-Security Issues
-Crawl and Index issues

And I have not made any important changes to the website.

Can you post a screenshot of all this in GSC?

Sorry, I don’t understand.

Post a screenshot of GSC here?

Yes, so that I can see what you’re seeing.

Is this GSC screenshot good enough?

https://ibb.co/w0YHDr0

Is this behavior in GSC new or do you know if it was like that before?
Have you made any changes to your robots.txt?

@tomucho The screenshot you provided, that looks fine. It’s completely normal for Google to have indexed content via other means than just the XML sitemap. The URL for your homepage is in the XML sitemap and, by the sounds of it, you’re not seeing any errors relating to the sitemap in GSC.

That screenshot doesn’t have anything to do with a drop in traffic. You would need to look in Google Analytics and dig into the traffic reports to see whether the drop occurred for a specific traffic source and then you could determine if something changed for that source.

Michael Torbert & wpsmort,
Thanks for your responses.

@michael Torbert

Is this behavior in GSC new or do you know if it was like that before?

I don’t know.
I have not checked GSC as much as I did this week.

Have you made any changes to your robots.txt?

No, I have not.

@wpsmort

I have analyzed Google Analytics traffic reports and the only source to be down is
Google organic traffic.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by tomucho.

@tomucho I think what he’s saying is that sitemap issues in GSC won’t themselves result in a drop in traffic. ie if you delete your sitemap from GSC, Google doesn’t demote your pages in the rankings.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Michael Torbert.

Michael Torbert,

Thanks for the clarification.

My initial concern was that in Coverage Sitemaps showed as N/A.

Since there are not manual actions, penalties or security issues in GSC…

What else could it be the cause for this massive drop?

…Google June algorithm change?

@tomucho With regards to the N/A, I believe that just means that Google hasn’t updated that Coverage report with the fact that it’s in the sitemap. You can safely ignore this because you know the URL is in the sitemap.

It’s impossible to say why your traffic is down. You may want to post in the Google Product Support Forums to see if there are any known issues with the traffic reports.

Thanks wpsmort.

I really appreciate your feedback.

Cheers,

J

So let’s get this straight: our sitemap schema is 100% valid. We did experience an issue some time ago where Google changed their file name convention without giving notice, but this wouldn’t have affected your organic traffic and certainly could not account for a two digit percentage drop. There’s no need to bash anyone. There’s either a bug in Google Search Console or there was a PageRank algorithm update that is now negatively affecting your rankings.

@tomucho

or if the plugin was not creating the sitemap correctly… Moreover It seemed odd that they were updating constantly their plugin in a very short period of time…

This is a public, open-source project. Every single change, and the entire development process is public on Github: https://github.com/semperfiwebdesign/all-in-one-seo-pack/

There’s also a changelog here: https://semperplugins.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-changelog/

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Michael Torbert.